Food and Mood: Just-in-Time Support for Emotional Eating

Abstract

Abstract-Behavior modification in health is difficult, as habitual behaviors are extremely well-learned, by definition. This research is focused on building a persuasive system for behavior modification around emotional eating. In this paper, we make strides towards building a just-in-time support system for emotional eating in three user studies. The first two studies involved participants using a custom mobile phone application for tracking emotions, food, and receiving interventions. We found lots of individual differences in emotional eating behaviors and that most participants wanted personalized interventions, rather than a pre-determined intervention. Finally, we also designed a novel, wearable sensor system for detecting emotions using a machine learning approach. This system consisted of physiological sensors which were placed into women's brassieres. We tested the sensing system and found positive results for emotion detection in this mobile, wearable system.

Characteristics of Smartphone Applications for Nutrition Improvement in Community Settings: A Scoping Review

“…Personalized settings and the ability to turn off features were considered important across population groups (74,90,93). Personalization of goals and challenges, and feedback based on these, was considered important by overweight and general adult populations (39,41,74,80,88). Similarly, using culturally relevant and favorite foods within games was desirable for low-SES populations (50,79,89) and enabled transfer of learning to real life (85).…”

“…The size of the testing sample varied greatly. The most common size was between 11 and 20 testers (9 studies) (48,72,79,85,86,(88)(89)(90)92), followed by #10 testers (4 studies) (73,76,85,90), 21-50 testers (3 studies) (36,74,77), 51-100 testers (2 studies) (70, 80), 101-200 testers (2 studies) (75,92), and least commonly >200 testers (1 study) (65).…”

“…Field deployment (real-time use of the application by consumers in the intended setting), with or without participant observation, was the most common testing design used. This approach was taken in 3 nutritionimprovement trials (36,48,50) and 13 application-development projects (65,68,70,72,74,76,79,80,85,(88)(89)(90)92). Other common approaches were testing of application components (36,52,75,85) and focus groups (73,85,86).…”

“…These included principles from goal-setting theory (48), ecological momentary intervention (48), behavioral self-management (52), learning theory (51), motivational-enhancement approaches (52), behavioral economic theory (65), Atkin and Michie's principles of individual behavior change (65), microlearning principles (70), cognitive behavioral therapy (88), and health communication and education theory (85). Mindful eating, social engagement, low burden, low-judgement approaches (80), self-regulation strategies of goal setting, self-monitoring, feedback (42,93,95), highlighting affective consequences, providing information, and rewards (98) were also suggested or used.…”

“…Multiple strategies were used in one self-monitoring trial (42), 5 nutrition-improvement trials (48,(50)(51)(52)57), and 6 development projects (65,74,77,86,88,89).…”